‘MAD MEN’ RETURNS TO AN AMERICA WITH A CHANGING DREAM

“Mad Men”

When: 9 p.m. Sunday

Where: AMC

Even if creator Matthew Weiner hadn’t threatened to unleash the hounds of AMC hell on anyone who divulges virtually anything about the long-awaited fifth season of “Mad Men,” I wouldn’t want to spoil a minute of Sunday’s two-hour premiere. It is, of course, just that good.

In fact, based on the premiere, the season may wind up being the show’s best.

Of course, anticipation would potentially color anyone’s take on “Mad Men,” given the 17-month gap between seasons.

The fourth season ended with Don Draper (Jon Hamm) impulsively proposing marriage to his secretary, Megan (Jessica Pare), while Joan Harris (Christina Hendricks) found herself pregnant after a brief liaison with Roger Sterling (John Slattery), and the ad firm Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce was still reeling from the loss of its lucrative Lucky Strikes account.

While the show is an ensemble piece, the compelling psychological black hole in the middle of it all is Draper. He’s slick, smooth, drunk, haunted and ultimately on the run from himself. His job, like his purpose in life, is to sell illusion.

Don Draper is never satisfied, perhaps because no matter how much he drinks, how many women he sleeps with, how successful his career is, he can never escape himself or his past. We saw this most tellingly at the end of Season 4 in his proposal to Megan.

We may have said, at first, where did that come from? But the answer was there in the death of Anna Draper, the widow of the real Don Draper. In a way, we might have expected Anna’s death to act as a kind of sad but liberating event in Don’s life, but it only further fueled his guilt and made him more desperate to run from his past.

“Mad Men” mines the emergence of American social history from the doldrums of the 1950s. Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce started the decade in seemingly total control of its own destiny, manufacturing and selling the American dream. But as the decade has worn on, the “Mad Men” have found it hard to adjust to a new sensibility, where the entire notion of an American dream is under fire.